A spokesman for Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, raised the possibility on Wednesday that Mr. Perry might not participate in all of the contest’s upcoming debates.

“We will look at each debate individually and then make a decision,” Mark Miner, the spokesman for Mr. Perry, said. He earlier told Politico that the governor will participate in the next debate, in Michigan, but that future ones are not assured.

“I think all the campaigns are expressing frustration right now,” Mr. Miner said. “We said we would do Michigan but the primaries are around the corner and you have to use your time accordingly.”

Mr. Miner’s comments follow ones by his candidate on Tuesday night in which Mr. Perry expressed regret for participating in the debates — many of which did not go well for him.

“These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates,” Mr. Perry told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. “It pretty hard to be able to sit and lay out your ideas and your concepts with a one minute response.

“So, you know, if there was a mistake made, it was probably ever doing one,” Mr. Perry added.

Perry also told O'Reilly that the point of the debates seems to be "stirring it up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people about how you gonna get us back to work."

Right. Of course, having a thoughtful discussion about those "issues" is tough when you have to spend time answering questions about such matters as, oh, why the fuck you started Trumping out on birther bullshit. Of course, once Perry got that stirred up, he was done talking about it.

“I’ll cut you off right there,” Mr. Perry said. “That is one of the biggest distractions that there is going. We need to be talking about jobs. If somebody wants to see my birth certificate, I’d be happy to show it to ‘em. But the fact is that this is a distraction, and Americans really don’t care about that, if you want to know the truth of the matter.”

Mr. Perry revived the birther matter in an interview in Parade magazine this weekend and another with CNBC in which he said the question over Mr. Obama’s birthplace “is a good issue to keep alive. It’s fun to poke at him.”

At this point, Perry ought to just turn over his campaign to Bad Lip Reading. They can't do him any more harm than he's doing to himself.